Robert Edward "Bob" Crane (July 13, 1928 – June 29, 1978) was an American actor, drummer, radio host, and disc jockey.

Crane began his career as a disc jockey in New York and Connecticut before moving to Los Angeles where he hosted the number-one rated morning show. In the early 1960s, he moved into acting. Crane is best known for his performance as Colonel Robert E. Hogan in the CBS sitcom Hogan's Heroes. The series aired from 1965 to 1971, and Crane received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his work on the series.

After Hogan's Heroes ended, Crane's career declined. He became frustrated with the few roles he was being offered and began doing dinner theater. In 1975, he returned to television in the NBC series The Bob Crane Show. The series received poor ratings and was cancelled after 13 weeks. Afterwards, Crane returned to performing in dinner theaters and also appeared in occasional guest spots on television.

While on tour for his play Beginner's Luck in June 1978, Crane was found bludgeoned to death in his Scottsdale apartment, a murder that remains officially unsolved.

Crane was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, and spent his childhood and teenage years in Stamford.[1] He began playing drums at a young age, and by junior high he was organizing local drum and bugle parades with his neighborhood friends.[2] Later he became involved in his high school's marching and jazz bands and the orchestra.[3] He played for the Connecticut and Norwalk Symphony Orchestras as part of their youth orchestra program.[4] He graduated from Stamford High School in 1946.[1] In 1948 Crane enlisted in the Connecticut Army National Guard and was honorably discharged in 1950.[5]

In 1965, Crane was offered the starring role in a television comedy pilot about a German P.O.W. camp. Hogan's Heroes became a hit and finished in the Top Ten in its first year on the air. The series lasted six seasons, and Crane was nominated for an Emmy Award twice, in 1966 and 1967. During its run, he met Patricia Olson, who played Hilda under the stage name Sigrid Valdis. He divorced his wife of twenty years and married Olson on the set of the show in 1970. They had a son, Scotty (Robert Scott), and adopted a daughter named Ana Marie.

In addition to playing the drums on the theme song, Crane's musical talent can also be seen in the sixth season episode "Look at the Pretty Snowflakes," where he has an extended drum solo during the prisoners' performance of the jazz standard"Cherokee".

Following the cancellation of Hogan's Heroes in 1971, Crane appeared in two Disney films, Superdad (1973) in the title role and Gus (1976) in a featured role.

In 1973, Crane purchased the rights to Beginner's Luck, a play that he starred in and directed. The production toured for five years, predominantly at dinner theaters around the country.[6] During breaks he guest starred in a number of TV shows, including Police Woman, Gibbsville, Quincy, M.E., and The Love Boat. In 1975 Crane returned to TV with his own series; The Bob Crane Show was canceled by NBC after three months (13 episodes).

At the time of his death Crane had recently taped a travel documentary in Hawaii, and had recorded an appearance on the Canadian cooking-talk show Celebrity Cooks. Out of respect for his death, neither was ever aired. However, Crane's appearance on Celebrity Cooks was recreated in the biopic film Auto Focus.

Crane became a fixture on the dinner theatre scene and performed there for ten years. In 1969, he starred with Abby Dalton in Cactus Flower. He also performed in Send Me No Flowers, but his most popular performances were in Beginner's Luck, which he toured at The Showboat Dinner Theatre in St. Petersburg, Florida, the La Mirada Civic Theatre in California, and the Windmill Dinner Theatre in Scottsdale, Arizona. Crane was performing at the Windmill at the time of his death.

In 1949, Crane married his high school sweetheart Anne Terzian. They adopted a daughter, Ana Marie (January 13, 1951), and had three children: Robert David (June 27, 1951), Deborah Ann (June 19, 1959), and Karen Leslie (November 29, 1961). The couple divorced in 1970.[7]

Later that year, Crane married his Hogan's Heroes co-star Sigrid Valdis on the set of the series.[8] They had a son, Robert Scott 'Scotty' (June 4, 1971).[9] Valdis and Crane separated in 1977, but reportedly reconciled shortly before his death.[8]

Crane frequently videotaped and photographed his own sexual escapades.[10] During the run of Hogan's Heroes,Richard Dawson introduced Crane to John Henry Carpenter, a regional sales manager for Sony Electronics who often helped famous clients with their video equipment.[11] The two men struck up a friendship and began going to bars together. Crane attracted women due to his celebrity status and introduced Carpenter as his manager. Later, they would videotape their sexual encounters.[12] While Crane's son Robert later insisted that all of the women were aware of the videotaping and consented to it, some, according to one source, had no idea that they had been filmed until informed by Scottsdale police after Crane's murder.[13] Carpenter later became national sales manager at Akai, and arranged his business trips to coincide with Crane's dinner theater touring schedule so that the two could continue seducing and videotaping women. At some point, however, the friendship began to deteriorate.[14]

Apartment 132A of the Winfield Place Apartments (now the Winfield Place Condominium) where Crane was murdered

A funeral wreath on apartment 132A.

Crane's grave

In June 1978, Crane was living in the Winfield Place Apartments in Scottsdale, Arizona while appearing in Beginner's Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theatre. On the afternoon of June 29 Crane's co-star Victoria Ann Berry found his body in his apartment after he failed to show up for a lunch meeting.[15] Crane had been bludgeoned to death with a weapon that was never found, though investigators believed it to be a camera tripod. An electrical cord had been tied around his neck.[16]

More than 20 years after his death, Crane's widow, Sigrid Valdis, had his remains exhumed and transported approximately 25 miles southeast to Westwood Village Memorial Park in Westwood. After her death from lung cancer in 2007, Valdis was buried next to him.

According to an episode of A&E's Cold Case Files, police officers at the crime scene noted that John Henry Carpenter called the apartment several times, and did not seem surprised that the police were there, which raised suspicions. Carpenter's rental car was impounded and searched; several blood smears were found that matched Crane's blood type. DNA testing was not available at that time. Due to insufficient evidence, Maricopa County Attorney Charles F. Hyder declined to file charges.

In 1990 the Maricopa County Attorney re-opened Crane's murder case; investigators re-examined and retested the evidence found in June 1978.[18] Although DNA testing of the blood found in Carpenter's rental car was inconclusive, Detective Jim Raines discovered an evidence photograph of the car's interior that appeared to show a piece of brain tissue. The tissue samples that had been found in Carpenter's car the day after Crane's murder had been lost, but an Arizona judge ruled that the new evidence was admissible.[18] In June 1992 Carpenter was arrested and charged with Crane's murder.[19][20]

At Carpenter's 1994 trial, Crane's eldest son Robert testified that in the weeks before his father's death, Crane had repeatedly expressed a desire to sever his friendship with Carpenter. Carpenter had become "a hanger-on", he said, and "a nuisance to the point of being obnoxious".[21] He testified that Crane called Carpenter the night before the murder and ended their friendship.[22]

Defense attorneys attacked the prosecution's case as circumstantial and inconclusive. They countered testimony that Carpenter and Crane were on bad terms, and they labeled the determination that a camera tripod was the murder weapon as sheer speculation, based on Carpenter's occupation. They disputed the claim that the newly discovered evidence photo showed brain tissue, noting that authorities did not have the tissue itself. They pointed out that Crane had been videotaped and photographed in compromising sexual positions with numerous women, implying that a jealous person or someone fearing blackmail might have been the killer.[23]

Carpenter was found not guilty. He continued to maintain his innocence until his death in 1998. Crane's murder remains officially unsolved.[24]

Crane's life and murder were the subject of the 2002 film Auto Focus, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Greg Kinnear as Crane. The film, described as "brilliant" by critic Roger Ebert, portrays Crane as a happily married, church-going family man and popular Los Angeles disc jockey who succumbs to Hollywood's celebrity lifestyle after becoming a television star, meets Carpenter, learns the wonders of home video, and spirals into a life of strip clubs and sex addiction.[25]

Scotty, Crane's son with Sigrid Valdis, challenged the film's accuracy in an October 2002 review. "During the last 12 years of his life," he wrote, "[Crane] went to church three times: when I was baptized, when his father died, and when he was buried." Crane was a sex addict long before he became a star, he said, and may have begun recording his sexual encounters as early as 1956. There was no evidence, he claimed, that Crane engaged in BDSM; none was portrayed in any of his hundreds of home movies, and Schrader admitted that the film's BDSM scene was based on his own personal experience (while writing Hardcore).[26] Scotty Crane and Valdis had shopped a rival script alternately titled F-Stop and Take Off Your Clothes and Smile, but interest ceased after Auto Focus was announced.[27]

In June 2001 Scotty Crane launched the web site bobcrane.com. It included a paid section featuring photographs, outtakes from his father's sex films, and Crane's autopsy report, which, Scotty claimed, disproved the allegation that his father had a penile implant.[13][28][29] The site has since been renamed "Bob Crane: The Official Web Site", and no longer includes a pay wall or controversial material.